How many times have you received Facebook friend requests from people you know but don’t talk to? Or from people you don’t know at all? It’s as if there’s a competition for the number of friends you have (one cousin has over 3000, and counting).

So how do you get Twitter followers? Always Be Linking. To random stuff people will click on. Repeat yourself. Follow people even if you don’t know them and aren’t interested in them. As many as possible. Attach yourself to popular people. Repeat yourself.

They’ve done a study on how many spam emails actually get read and how many actually lead to sales/computer infections. How? They actually extracted data from three existing spam bots running with a Storm worm.

The results are interesting. For your everyday ‘pharmaceutical’ (read: ‘give her a BIG surprise’) spam:

about 350 million emails were sent over 19 days

76% were not delivered/blocked

10,000 people visited the site promoted

only 28 actually made a purchase

That’s a conversion rate of 0.0000081%. (Yet it still apparently remains profitable enough…)

So, spam is not the way to go. Great example of HIGH AWARENESS, low influence.